Tired of having your mouse drift off the mouse pad during game play? If so, you will want to consider the XTrac Ripper XL and XTrac HAMMER gaming pads. XTrac promotes their Ripper/HAMMER mouse pads as large (they're ~17 x 11 inches), precise, and smooth. Everything you need in a mouse pad, right?

XTrac Ripper XL

First off, I will take a look at XTrac Ripper XL which is 14 by 17 3/4 inches!
This might not sound big, but it is about 3 times larger than the average mouse
pad. So big, it doesn't fit on my desk without some rearranging! The Xtrac
Ripper has a cloth surface and will work with an optical mouse. The rubber
backing allows the mouse pad to stick to your desk like glue. Pushing on it will
not slide it one inch.

To put the pad through its paces I played various games such as Painkiller,
Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Source, DOOM 3, Far Cry, Unreal Tournament 2004,
etc over a period of a few weeks. I found the whole experience very smooth mouse
movements without any lag or delays. However, it's lacking in the smoothness of
the XTrac HAMMER (see bellow), which is unfortunate. What I
really liked about it was the size of the Ripper XL. The sheer size of the mouse
surface ensures that you do not run out of mouse room during gameplay. If you
need to move your mouse all over the desk, than you will never run out of real
estate with the Ripper XL. It's also very portable and durable which makes it
perfect when going to LAN parties.

XTrac HAMMER

Also the XTrac HAMMER is absolutely massive. It measures 11x17 inches and is
approximately the same size as a dinner placemat. Surprisingly, the HAMMER is very thin, indeed
"credit card thin". The HAMMER's surface is a black and blue
hexagon honeycomb pattern providing enough randomness to make the mouse's
optical laser more responsive in most games and applications.

Make sure you have a desk big enough to support this monstrosity of a
mousepad! If the size is an issue you can simply lift your keyboard up and slide
part of the XTrac HAMMER underneath, minimizing the physical size of the pad and
not causing your keyboard to rock from side to side. The detailed pattern is meant to help reduce pointer jittering which
can sometimes plague optical mice (especially older models).

Once again, testing was done for a couple hours, and let me say this is one
impressive mousepad. The response was virtually identical to the Ripper XL,
however, what really set this mousepad apart was the smoothness of the mousepad.
The teflon on the mousepad really comes in handy - the mouse just glides over
the surface with hardly any power put into it whatsoever. Needless to say it's
pretty cool. While its $17.99 price-tag may be steep for the casual gamer,
XTracPad's smaller solutions (8.5"x11") such as
the XTrac Pro
HS (Hard-Surface) only cost $11.99 and deliver the same performance.

Conclusion

To be honest I thought that it was hype when XTrac contacted us and asked if
we would like to try their large size mouse mats. Who ever heard of such orcs
like large size computer mouse mats? But I was pleasantly surprised when I came
to use it. I find myself using more of the mat's area than I would a normal mat
as my hand gestures become more extravagant. I can't fault this mat on accuracy
either and there was certainly no sign of any jittering, though I wouldn't
expect any issues in this department from my MX 510 mouse. Now, I admit that
these pads are fantastic mousepad (especially the HAMMER) for the extreme gamers and hardcore computing
world. It would also be great if XTracPads could create custom designs with clan
logos or just hardcore gamers looking to be different.

Note: I would like to thank Christopher Kahl
of XTracPads for making
this review possible. I encourage all readers to check out
XTracPads for a wide
range of mouse-pad solutions.